The senator of the Socialist Party, Juan Luis Castro, referred to the current situation in the southern part of the country, where, using a metaphor, he maintained that “this patient has gotten worse recently, it was already complicated. The recipes of the previous government did not work.”
“The security problems today are very hard, they have escalated, they have gone beyond what we would all imagine. Does it come from before? Yes, but they have intensified. I think you have to show a lot of strength, a lot of firmness on the part of the authority” , he stated.
“From my point of view, this requires action and not weakness, and the President is risking it for doing things better,” he added.
He also recalled that “the new government has tried to open a dialogue, not everyone has accepted that dialogue. There are groups that have said it themselves, they are at war against the State, therefore the combination of dialogue plus the exercise of protection and of force – to the extent that human rights are respected accordingly. It must be done”.
As a result of the “limited” state of exception in the southern part of the country, the parliamentarian affirmed that it is a complex scenario, for which he proposed that the land negotiations be carried out with caution and decision.
“No one knows if attacks can be extrapolated to other parts of the country tomorrow. I would not want Chile to have a mix of terrorism with legitimate causes, in the style of what happened with Sendero Luminoso at one time in the 1990s. Peru,” he commented.
“No one wants that for Chile or for it to become a permanent focus, an enclave where the state cannot enter. That seems incredible, but it is about to happen if there is not a more energetic and clear intervention to stop those sources of terrorism that are embedded in the causes of the Mapuche people and that are legitimate, but it seems to me that they have to be better channeled in the dialogue with the government,” he concluded.
